Fol­low­ing Bill (fossilapostle’s) lead, I’ll play along with the “music meme” that’s mak­ing the rounds.

Go to Pop Cul­ture Mad­ness and check out the songs from the year in which you turned 18 (1984 for me, if any­one cares). Bold the songs you like(d). Under­line or strike the songs you didn’t/don’t. I’m ital­i­ciz­ing the ones I’m most­ly okay with Like Bill, I’m just leav­ing the ones I don’t have any strong feel­ing about alone. Most of those, hon­est­ly, I just don’t remem­ber. I’d prob­a­bly react I heard them instead of just read­ing their names.

A lot of peo­ple my age seem to remem­ber the songs of the 80s by their videos. Our fam­i­ly didn’t have cable TV, and I wasn’t a big TV watch­er any way, so I didn’t see most of the videos that went with these songs.

If they’d asked about con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian music of the time, I’d remem­ber more. I was singing all the time at church back then, and con­stant­ly look­ing for new mate­r­i­al.

To be hon­est, I didn’t remem­ber a whole lot of the peo­ple at my high school reunion, even though it had only been five years since we’d grad­u­at­ed. As peo­ple came over and greet­ed us, I read their nametags, played the small talk game, and kept turn­ing to the girl­friend who attend­ed with me and hus­band v.2 say­ing, “Are you sure he/she went to school with us? Absolute­ly?” (They knew who I was — one ben­e­fit of being the vale­dic­to­ri­an and being involved in a bunch of extracur­ric­u­lars, plus hav­ing a best friend who has nev­er met a stranger. At least she remem­bered all of them!) That’s part of why I didn’t both­er going to the oth­er reunions we’ve had since then. Sad­ly, I’m doing bet­ter with the songs than I did with the peo­ple, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing.